Vain Attempts to Tame Chaos
I recently read a portion of a riveting work entitled, Selecting & Appraising Archives and Manuscripts by Frank Boles {archived}. (If you’re not professionally into information science, don’t worry about reading that anytime soon.) In Chapter 3 - The Big Picture: Mission Statements, Records Management, and Collection Development Policies, the author mentions the shenanigans of respected computer scientist Seymour Cray, who would create “…one- and five-year plans by annually submitting a one-sentence plan noting that this sentence was one-fifth of his five sentence five-year plan,” in an utter rebellion against attempts at any kind of order. Ha!
I’ve worked for a few Seymour Crays. I’m the person they push against; the type who files, stamps, indexes, briefs, debriefs, & numbers everything until it gets out of hand and puts a stop to my nonsense. It’s as if the process of creating workflows is more exciting to my brain than utilizing those very systems.
More than one science fiction story has been written about those of us obsessed with anal retentive organizing. We are often the villains:
- Terry Gilliam’s movie “Brazil” paints a grim picture of tight bureaucracy, thwarted by a hero, Harry Tuttle, a renegade air conditioning specialist who eventually gets swallowed by the very paperwork he was trying to subdue,
- Number 6, the hero of the television show “The Prisoner,” fights against his own power-hungry self, Number 1, when he states,”I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered,”
- Mary Poppins’s Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious gives a by-the-rules banker enough jolly to make him float,
- and “CENTRAL Central Intelligence” in the land of Camazotz from the children’s story “A Wrinkle In Time,” is the the personification of evil, its central base controlled by an evil disembodied brain called IT.
Is Seymour Cray the archivist’s, or records manager’s, nemesis? Perhaps we just balance each other out. Because without all the sorting, cataloging, tagging and keywording, no one would be able to find anything.
Overall, I believe that, among many other things, over-organization can limit creativity. By “Creativity,” I’m referring to that which births artwork and music, but it can also limit someone’s ability to perform creative problem solving. For example, a computer programmer needs to find ways to create software that performs a certain task. If that programmer is too slowed down by records managers seeking to control the creation process, they will become stifled.
Unless organizational methods are seamlessly integrated into a person’s workflow along with a spoonful of sugar, they won’t be adhered to, nor should they. Thank you, Seymour Cray, for humorously reminding us all of that.
